A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a  Ephesians 5:8-14  John 9:1-41

St. John Chrysostom could see why the disciples asked our Lord the question, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (Jn 9:2). Christ had just healed a paralytic, telling him to sin no more. 

The fathers of the church felt such questions were necessary. St. Ambrose said, “Since the Lord did not overlook him, neither ought we to overlook this story of a man whom the Lord considered worthy of his attention” (Letter, 67.1). And as Chrysostom noted, it was Jesus “who saw the blind man, not the blind man who came to him” (Homily on John, 56.1). Clearly, Christ was “up to something.”

Theodore of Mopsuestia also tried to put himself in the minds of the disciples. “They thought that there was a just reason for such an accident and that such adversity had occurred not without good cause because they knew that God rules all human beings” (Commentary on John, 4.9.1-2). 

The fathers of the church could see that sin was not the cause of the man’s blindness. Apollinaris of Laodicea wrote:

Since he was a blind man from birth, it occurred to the disciples to ask. Since no one can sin before his birth, they ventured to guess that the parents were to blame. For they knew that children may suffer in order to bring grief to the parents. 

But the Lord said that the blindness did not occur because of any sin but for the sake of the glory of God that was about to take place as the power of God would be revealed through his unexpected recovery of sight (Fragments on John, 49).

But “God’s glory” raises as many questions as it answers. Chrysostom wondered, along with many of us, “was it not possible that the glory of God should be shown without this man’s punishment?” (Gospel of John, 56.1). And he answered, “Certainly it was not impossible, for it was possible.” The archbishop of Constantinople concluded that the blind man “received benefit from his blindness. Because he recovered the sight of the eyes within.” 

Pope St. Gregory the Great suggested something similar, comparing the man born blind to our own experience. 

One blow falls on the sinner for punishment only, not conversion. Another occurs for correction; still another happens not in order to correct past sins but for the prevention of future sins. Another blow happens neither for correcting past nor preventing future sins. Rather, the unexpected deliverance following the blow serves to excite a love more focused on the Savior’s goodness (Morals on the Book of Job, Preface 5.12).

Yes, like the disciples before them, the fathers of the church had many questions. And that is precisely what we must note. We Christians pose our questions about life because we are convinced that the world is meaningful, even when we cannot fully comprehend or explain it. This questioning sets us apart from so many of our contemporaries who do not believe.

Consider the atheist, who asserts that everything that happens in the world is the result of forces beyond our control, indeed beyond anyone’s control. We may think that we are winning or losing in life and that we freely make the decisions that produce these results, but that is only because we ignore the long line of causes that have predetermined our lives: our upbringing, our environment, our genetic dispositions. And of course, standing beyond and beneath our own little adventure is biological evolution and the universe’s vast array of unswerving physical laws. We are just a link in an endless chain, they say.

Some atheists put their faith in science, thinking that a method can answer questions beyond its scope, beyond the minds that fashioned it. Science is a wonderful tool when we ask what happened, but it is quite useless when we ask why a chain of causes exists in the first place. 

Yet human life poses just this sort of question. We are created—our contemporaries would probably say we are programmed—to ask two fundamentally distinct questions: how the world works and why it exists in the first place. One question belongs to science; the other, to religion or philosophy.

This is why thinking atheists, having reckoned as they have, must set aside questions about the meaning of existence in order to live in the world. How else can they continue the struggle? At least, once life becomes a strain. Yet even when life appears to be an unbroken chain of advances, how does one keep from asking where it is going? Death denies all wealth, all power, all loves. If death has the last word, what is the significance of anything spoken before it?

We Christians often speak of the gifts given to us in baptism: forgiveness of sins, new life, incorporation into the people of God. All so true, but even more foundational is the gift of a meaningful life because to affirm the existence of God is really to say that the world is not without purpose, that it comes forth from an all-knowing, all-powerful and loving source, whom we call God. 

Believers live for an unknown “other” because we know that we cannot live for ourselves. We are not our own origin or destiny. We are certainly not that of the cosmos. We either come from someone—since our origin cannot be less than ourselves—or we come from nothing. And if we come from nothing, we are destined to return to the same. 

We believers cannot answer our own questions, at least not to our satisfaction. But we equally cannot stop asking those questions, and that is what makes life worth living. We think that our existence is meaningful, not accidental. Love is the world’s meaning, even if, having seen the death and resurrection of Christ, we are only beginning to understand that love for ourselves.

Commenting upon the man born blind, St. Cyril of Alexandria wrote,

Concerning such matters we should piously acknowledge that there are certain wondrous things that God alone understands. At the same time we should maintain and believe that since God will neither do nor determine anything whatsoever in human affairs or in those of the rest of creation that is unbecoming to God or differs from the true righteousness of justice (Commentary on the Gospel of John, 56.2).

Questions! So many questions! Science can answer our questions about how something happens. If not, it promises one day so to do. But questions about why things happen have no answers in this world. They must either be suppressed—at what cost we cannot say—or they must await the advent of a world yet to come. 

Let Theodore of Mospuestia have the last word because he turns our faces forward:

The Lord taught the disciples that there are many reasons for all these events and that they are certainly secret and unexplainable. And so, we always complain about events whose causes we ignore, but then we also learn that nothing happens in vain. This knowledge will be given to us in the future world, because what is hidden now will be revealed to us (Commentary on John, 4.9.3).

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.